BRUSSELS—Oracle Corp. is digging in against the European Union's objections to its bid for Sun Microsystems Inc.

In a closed-door hearing that began Thursday and is to continue Friday, and in legal papers that haven't been made public, the U.S.-based database giant is mounting a broad attack on the EU's proposition that Sun's MySQL is an important competitive force in the database industry that market-leader Oracle shouldn't be allowed to own.

Oracle contends that the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, misrepresented the opinions of database users and gave a"distorted view" of the market by "selectively" quoting from surveys as it put together its case.

U.S. authorities have cleared the $7.4 billion bid, but the EU's concerns have delayed it.

Complaints that the EU is selective in its use of evidence are common fare from companies that find themselves in the regulator's crosshairs. Recently, Intel Corp. claimed the EU ignored exculpatory material in its antitrust finding and €1.06 billion ($1.56 billion)fine against the chip maker.

While the US DoJ approved Oracle's purchase of Sun back in August, the European Commission has been less forthcoming. Widenius points out that Oracle has been using their customers to put pressure on the EC, and he questions Oracle's commitment to MySQL, saying their vague promises aren't good enough. He writes:

"Oracle has NOT promised (as far as I know and certainly not in a legally binding manner):

To keep (all of) MySQL under an open source license;

Not to add closed source parts, modules or required tools;

To not raise MySQL license or MySQL support prices;

To release new MySQL versions in a regular and timely manner;

To continue with dual licensing and always provide affordable commercial licenses to MySQL to those who needs them (to storage vendors and application vendors) or provide MySQL under a more permissive license;

To develop MySQL as an Open Source project;

To actively work with the community;

Apply submitted patches in a timely manner;

To not discriminate patches that make MySQL compete more with Oracle's other products;

To ensure that MySQL is improved also in manners that make it compete even more with Oracle's main offering."

This is, of course, one of the reasons open source licenses are so useful and so powerful: anyone can fork the code and keep developing the software, no matter what Oracle does or doesn't do.

Oracle executives and their advisers on Thursday accused Europe’s top competition regulator of misrepresenting customer evidence as they tried to overturn objections to the US group’s proposed $7.4bn purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Oral hearings, held in private, over the deal began in Brussels on Thursday morning and will continue on Friday.

Officials at the European Commission are concerned about the impact the merger could have on the database market – in particular Oracle’s control of MySQL, an open source database company bought last year by Sun.

Although this is a relatively small part of the overall deal, critics say Oracle would have an incentive to suppress or restructure a product that is given away for free and poses a disruptive threat to its own business. The other big players in the market are IBM and Microsoft.

The Commission has based its concerns partly on the results of a market survey, and the responses generated from database users.

But on Thursday Oracle was understood to have argued that customer comments were misrepresented and cherry-picked. According to its reply to the Commission, which has been seen by the Financial Times and which formed the basis for Thursday’s presentation, Oracle claims “many if not most”of the two dozen customers cited in the Commission’s statement of objections “do not support the Commission’s theory of harm”.

The European Union has managed to do something that US Presidents often find difficult: to make 59 US Senators from both sides of the aisle agree on something.

A group led by John Kerry (D) and Orrin Hatch(R) has sent a letter to the European Union, asking it to wrap up the investigation of the Oracle-Sun merger and let the deal go through. Interestingly, the letter emphasizes the damage the delay and uncertainty are doing to Sun."

The article paraphrases a Gartner analyst, who points out that the Senators' letter "comes from a US point of view and doesn't take into account how the EU operates.

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From Sun's 8-K SEC filing:'The Statement of Objections sets out the Commission's preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products.'

Oracle's Sun Deal: Oracle May Need to Loosen Its GripWhile the Oracle-Sun merger is likely to be O.K.'d, the European Union will probably ask Oracle to give up some control over MySQL, Sun's open-source software

When Oracle announced its $7.4 billion acquisition of SunMicrosystems in April, the software behemoth was acting on a grand vision. The deal was part of Oracle's aim to become a soup-to-nuts supplier of everything companies need to run their computer systems,from chips and operating systems to databases and business programs.The grand plan may need some revision.

In order to alleviate pressure from European Union regulators worried about Oracle's growing power, Oracle may be forced to give up some control of a key aspect of the deal: the open-source MySQL database software owned by Sun.

The EU wants to make sure Oracle doesn't stifle competition in the $19-billion-a-year database market as it tries to complete its acquisition of Sun,which makes computer systems and software including the Java programming language and MySQL database, a kind of electronic filing system.

"Taking a Tough Stance"MySQL, available free of charge, runs the Web sites of some of the Internet's biggest brands. Among them: Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo."They're taking a tough stance because 10 years down the road this could be a pretty big competitor to Oracle," says a securities analyst who asked not to be named because he was expressing personal views on the deal.

Oracle today announced the new release of Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 including significant new features for high availability, scalability and performance, and demonstrating Oracle’s continuing commitment to open source, Java and the developer community.

A member of the Oracle Berkeley DB product family, Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition is an open source, transactional storage engine for key-value pairs written entirely in Java that can be deployed as an embedded or “edge” database, enabling developers to build applications that require no manual administration.

Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 includes new replication features for high availability and scalability and significant performance improvements for highly concurrent applications. Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 4.0 with high availability is available under the existing Oracle dual license for Berkeley DB Java Edition.

All three products are designed for developers, ISVs, OEMs and enterprises to integrate directly into their software applications,devices and equipment to deliver high performance, reliability and availability with virtually no human administration.

It looks like Sun will be shedding 3,000 jobs, roughly 10% of their workforce, as they continue to lose money while waiting for EC regulators to approve their acquisition by Oracle. Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison said Sept. 22 that Sun is losing about $100 million a month as the transaction is delayed by the EU probe.

James Staten, an analyst with Forrester, said, "The longer a cloud of uncertainty hangs over Sun, that drives customers into delays of purchases or into the hands of competitors. This is a very trying time for Sun and Oracle as they wait for an answer."

A spokesman for EU Competition Comissioner Neelie Kroes said today that she "expressed her disappointment that Oracle failed to produce, despite repeated requests, either hard evidence that there were no competition problems or a proposal for a remedy to the competition concerns identified by the commission," and that "a rapid solution lies in Oracle's hands."

The foreign key identifies a column or a set of columns in one(referencing) table that refers to a column or set of columns in another (referenced) table.

The columns in the referencing table must be the primary key or other candidate keyin the referenced table. The values in one row of the referencing columns must occur in a single row in the referenced table. Thus, a row in the referencing table cannot contain values that don't exist in the referenced table (except potentially NULL).

This way references can be made to link information together and it is an essential part of database normalization. Multiple rows in the referencing table may refer to the same row in the referenced table. Most of the time, it reflects the one (master table,or referenced table) to many (child table, or referencing table)relationship.

Oracle's $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun is currently being held up by an investigation by the European Commission. The Commission's main concern seems to be MySQL, which was acquired by Sun in January 2008 for $1 billion.

A takeover by the world's leading proprietary database company of the world's leading open source database company compels the regulator to closely examine the effects on the European market, according to remarks made by Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes last month.

The key objective by Widenius is to find a home outside Oracle for MySQL, where the database can be developed and compete with existing products, including Oracle's,according to Florian Mueller, a former MySQL shareholder who isc urrently working with Monty Program AB on this matter.

The EU has been worried that Oracle's acquisition of Sun could end up hurting competition by dampening or killing MySQL's momentum.

But in his letter, Mickos separates MySQL-the-community from MySQL-the-company, arguing that Oracle's takeover cannot hurt the MySQL community: 'Those two meanings of the term "MySQL" stand in a close, mutually beneficial interaction with each other. But, most importantly, this interaction is voluntary and cannot be directly controlled by the vendor.'

In a follow-up interview with CNET, Mickos indicated that he has no financial interest in the matter, but instead argues he 'couldn't live with the fact that [he's] not taking action,' and is 'motivated now by trying to help the employees still at MySQL and Sun, and by an urge to bring rational discussion to the matter.'